skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What to do when you're out of money and can't find a job?
Hey HN,

I have reached the point of extreme desperation. I'm 39 years old, and I have been building software for 20+ years (started coding when I was 12), and I have multiple GitHub projects with 1000+ stars, and numerous with 100+. I have published 2 programming books, and have worked at some top companies.

I have been trying to find a job for the past 2 years, but I have been unable to get a single job offer after doing 100+ interviews. My last real job ended in 2019, so my resume has a 5 year gap that probably looks suspicious. In those 5+ years I started multiple (failed) businesses and spent all my savings in trying to bootstrap a small business that would provide a living for me. This looks like a huge red flag to most recruiters, but I think the HN crowd would understand.

At this point I have about a month of runway left before I can't pay rent and will face eviction, after which I have nothing to fall back on (I don't have any family or friends that can help). I am at my wits end, and I don't understand why I'm consistently rejected from every job I've applied to even though I am quite good at computers (though I'm not a good founder).

I also made the mistake of deleting my linkedin account years ago because I got tired of the constant barrage of spam, so now I am starting fresh with a new linkedin account and apparently most recruiters won't take you seriously unless you have lots of linkedin buddies. This seems very dumb to me, but it seems to be the current state of the hiring world (is what it is).

I know there is a lot of ageism in tech, and being 39 makes me a dinosaur. I have been rejected multiple times because I was told I was too old, though never in those terms ("not a good culture fit" yadda yadda).

I'm willing to work for below-average wages if it allows me to continue to survive, but communicating this to recruiters or anyone who's hiring is a signal of desperation, and nobody wants to hire people who are desperate.

Aside from getting a job at Starbucks, does anyone have any advice on how I can continue to survive? I'm out of ideas ("hacks") and short on time. Spamming my resume at every job ad I can find isn't working and I don't know what else to do.

Cheers and happy holidays!
> Some of the finest memories are just a jumble of similar situations though.

This is how I feel about Xmas, thanks for putting it in words.
There has to be google engineers here. Does this just fall on deaf ears? I realize it’s a massive corp but imagine high ranking staff have a say and input. Maybe they don’t and Sundar isn’t worried about that. Or they do a simple cost analysis and short-term they see the benefit and are willing to to risk long term erosion that maybe be minimal.

Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.
That looks great for speed, but what about recall?
I'm married to a Korean and have lived in Korea for a fair amount of time. I'd say for this to work well, Korea would somehow need to change a very deeply ingrained idea that watering down Korea would be the end of Korea. There are many times over the years that have had me in situations I've thought "These people would really rather run the population to zero than make it more welcoming and hospitable for foreigners." I can never get involved in politics here, naturalize
requires a strong proficiency in the Korean language, etc. Then just the inter-personal cultural aspects, it's really a lot to think about changing. This year I came to realize that it's so deeply rooted in many ways, that I think often they don't even know it's there.
Global production of hydrogen is about 75 million tons, about half from ammonia, half from capture during petroleum products (refining). That's a problem primarily due to it is plateaued and there isn't capability to increase supply unless someone makes ammonia crackers more efficient. The other major obstacle is natural gas has been artificially inexpensive due to the abundance of supply due to fracking. It's hard to compete with it. It's possible to build turbines that burn ammonia, but no-one wants it.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-demand...

https://www.irena.org/Energy-Transition/Technology/Hydrogen

https://www.crystec.com/kllhyame.htm
> I finally realized that I was repulsed by the story because the father reminded me of the worst aspects of myself.

dostoyevsky is brilliant at this
Any decent consumer SSD will be exactly the same, brands such as SK Hynix, Samsung, Crucial, WD, etc. same chips and same performance, much cheaper than the Apple tax.
Piss+ ofcourse. It sets up the zero-G defecation market for the much more profitable piss+poop product.

But the real money is in piss+poop enterprise which comes with SSO (single shit to orbit).
Thunderbolt 5 is PCIe 4.0 x4 but CPUs now have PCIe 5.0. Thunderbolt will probably always be one generation behind and of course more expensive due to the controller chips.
Definitely Andrew Ng's courses, especially for concrete explanations.
Thanks. Was not aware.

The other possibility, is that most of their tools were composed of biodegradable stuff, like wood, bones, and shells.

In Africa, they used wood and raw iron for their stuff (I have spears, shields, and arrows, from there). That doesn't tend to age well.
I’ve been working on writing this year. It’s hard. I have countless posts or ideas for posts sitting there because I don’t like them for one reason or another.

For me I don’t collect metrics or really try to think that anyone might read a shred of it. I think that’s been helpful. And also just publish it. In the grand scheme it’s for you anyways to enjoy and develop. One piece of advice that I’ve gotten, is to commit to your points or idea. I think that’s can even include committing to uncertainty. You might need to revise it later, but done thoughtfully if you have readers, they should respect that. If not, well, without comments and metrics what does it matter?

Over the holiday break I’ve migrated to my own blog instead of a platform. So I’ve certainly found it enjoyable even if frustrating!
Funny you mention that, while I know quite a few programming languages, I think most desktop applications that don't need a lot of bells and whistles, I'd probably make it with Pharo.

I haven't programmed in a while with Pharo but they have a built-in GUI framework. But there was also Bloc, if remember correctly.

Fun fact: you can then also ship the IDE itself with it, so people can hack into your application, if that's the sort of thing you'd want.
Back to embedded systems, particularly with Rust.

I did computer engineering in college some 10-15 years ago, where these projects were super basic and difficult to get into. Seems like massive advancements in the past decade. Maybe my eye has been watching for these, but I'm seeing many more posts about ESP32 projects, for example, being linked here. Same for RP2040s, along with sensors galore and wifi / bluetooth connections.

Picking Rust as language for the chips instead of the C and MicroPython. Rust has applications beyond the embedded systems and learning it lower level can be helpful if wanted in other cases.
Ask HN: Resources for better understanding quantum computing
Can anyone recommend resources to better understand the physics behind how a quantum computer works, or how they will work in theory?

I've been digging around trying to find a solid explanation for how they actually work, not just that they leverage superposition to do magic.

White papers welcome here, I'm not opposed to diving down a very technical theoretical physics rabbit hole if that's where the information lives today.

A few examples of questions I'm trying to better understand:

How does the computer control qubits in superposition to actually compute mathematical equations, for example?

How can the processor/controller check a qubit's value without collapsing superposition?

If only 105 qubits allow Google to calculate in 5 minutes what would take a normal CPU 10 septillion years to do, how is it possible that they're still years away from even doing anything useful? I get the challenges of error correction, but I haven't found any clear description of precisely what Willow computed or whether they did some basic tests and extrapolated with a few assumptions of scalability.
Seems that ScyllaDB takes advantage of https://seastar.io that shards across cores. It seems to still be open source (for the moment, at least). Wonder if other projects could benefit from its ideas.
If only Stalin knew!
No high-end consumer RDNA4 GPU this cycle. And it's only missing the very high-end model. So we'll still get at least a 7800xt equivalent and whatever CDNA MI models they come out with.

The market for the extreme high-end consumer is pretty small, so they're only missing out on clout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7XchzjMtcw
$200 billion is only about $30K per woman (about 6 million women in the right age bracket)--that's chump change. No woman who isn't already planning on having a child is going to change her mind over a single $30K payout when it's obvious that raising a child is in the multiple $100K range.

It's going to take multiple $million+ per woman to change the calculation.

(And this doesn't even take into account taking care of elderly. Marriage tends to be a prerequisite for children and women often wind up being the caretakers for both sets of elderly parents. And that often never ends. Yet more money required.)
There are also a lot cheaper ssds (nv2 or p3 are under 100 eur for 2tb often)
So you stopped using a tool because someone misspelled a word?
I forgot to add this one to my list, but it's exactly what I've been trying for the past few days, after I was reminded of it after hearing John Carmack, in a podcast, talk about learning things deeply.

This is one of the reasons I'm dissatisfied with myself. My greatest successes have been when I applied full attention to details out of frustration, which have been rare. I genuinely believe that my life would drastically improve if I'd stop rushing from one thing to another.
> One example is that I cannot live without the language server go-to-definition feature. What do you do if you need to look up the definition/implementation of some function which is in some other file?

Whatever you used for that before LSP.

Oh right ...
Early Christian Writings
Coming soon – offline speech recognition on your phone
This was true for people I know who had kids 20 years ago, but not so much today. When I became a parent, I thought I’d be meeting and hanging around with all the other parents, but so far (kid is now 12), this didn’t end up happening. Kids all hang out online now. Nobody wants to get together in person. My kid has had some friends for years, where I still have not even met the friends’ parents. In the rare event one of them wants to come over to our home to visit, the parent quietly drops the kid off at the end of our driveway and speeds away like a ninja.
Donnie Darko style.
Merry Slopmas
I've been a (professional?) embedded software engineer for 25 years. I tried rust a few times, but did not particularly enjoy the experience.

MY_GPIO.borrow(cs).borrow().as_ref().unwrap().odr.modify(|_, w| w.odr1().set_bit());
I want to be able to run five miles and start weightlifting for more overall strength.

I also would love to get better at developing partnerships with experts and those who are skilled in areas I'll never be skilled in.
* Improving K8S knowledge and maybe obtain a certification

* Learn a functional language (probably Elixir/Gleam)

* Launch at least one of my side projects

* Improving Mandarin skills

* Ending the long track of one of my favourite cycling granfondo (Nove Colli)
Was it the 9560 by chance? (The original AC / wifi5 one) Those were terrible. Our house isn’t practical to wire, so I had a lot of them. All swapped to AX210 cards (6E) and those work phenomenally.

I also dual boot, in addition to being an incurable distro hopper, and these AX210 cards worked out of the box in basically everything.
Cryopreservation could end death as we know it
Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity
Housing affordability, to a large degree, is a major issue in some specific areas. Heck, you go an hour outside of a city like Boston and real estate is priced fairly reasonably relative to typical income levels. People get a very distorted view because of SF/South Bay, Manhattan, Central London, etc. Good housing has always been a significant expense for a household. But most people actually can afford housing.
James Webb Telescope Unveils the Icy Secrets of Our Solar System's Birth
Exactly. While "Hell Joseon", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon, may be one factor as to why South Korea has such a low birth rate, Finland, which famously provides great support for new parents and is a much more egalitarian society than South Korea, had its fertility rate hit an all time low in 2023 of about 1.3 (better than SK, but still way below replacement rate).

Reliable birth control essentially "broke" millennia of evolution. Our evolutionary drive to have sex is as strong as it ever was, but now that drive can be fulfilled without the occasional outcome of children, which has been the case for only about the past 60 years. And children, at least in economic terms, are much more of a burden than a benefit in modern times.
Chang'e-6 Moon Mission Uncovers Secret Hidden for Billions of Years
Ranges are awfully useful in Ada, but a very small help in dimensionality/units analyis.

If you mean to go all the way on units, dimensions and typing, there's a bestiary there, quited maintained (with several Ada 'takes' too) https://www.gmpreussner.com/research/dimensional-analysis-in...
> I am talking about how confident they are depending on whether they know something.

IMHO, that's irrelevant. People don't really know they level of confidence either.

> feature LLMs still struggle with.

Even small LLMs are capable of doing that decently.
Sounds easy enough if you have access to a -25°C freezer.

So, umm, since the supposed reason is to prevent certain liquid explosives, and -40°C are a thing (as well as -80°C freezers - https://www.grainger.com/category/lab-supplies/lab-cooling-r... ) ... yeah, can't help but reinforce my belief it's all a sham.
Ask HN: Resources for general purpose GPU development on Apple's M* chips?
While Apple M* chips seems to have an incredible unified memory access, the available learning resources seem to be quite restricted and often convoluted. Has anyone been able to get past this barrier?
I have some familiarity with general purpose software development with CUDA and C++. I want to figure how to work with/ use Apple's developer resources for general purpose programming.
I usually prefer the 'reset' option (such as in IPMI). After all, this is the as-designed way to politely ask all devices to re-initialize.

Yes, power-cycling is more unambiguous, but afaikt, the example here is purely that power cycling really needs a noticable off-period so that all devices can fully come down. Otherwise, there's no real standard on what should happen - this or that component might stay up or retain state.

The other reason I like 'reset' is that lots of devices (fans, disks, probably all power systems - definitely including PSUs) have lifetime limits in power cycles. Mostly this is minor, unless you do something like reboot cluster nodes after a job (concievably a paranoid security requirement), or some automation gets in a loop and continually zaps a server.
My wife and I were saying the other day if the korean gov wanted to pay us to start popping out kids, it would be starting at $1.5MM per kid they would have to pay us. Heck we'd have 10 then!
Who is your blog's target audience? I write https://www.curiosities.dev/ for myself. I'm a non-expert in all of the posts.

When I revisit old posts, I digest the information differently and add more explorations/questions. It's much easier to build upon scaffolding that's already there. Maybe in N years, I'll have something insightful to say about X, but I don't have to hold off writing anything until then -- incomplete notes and rephrasing of other people's ideas already benefit me now.
Deploying ML models to production. I work in silicon at an established company, and management every year wants to incorporate “ML” and “AI” into our workflows, but it doesn’t happen because a) nobody wants to risk their review on it b) the median age is 40 and it requires a brain rewiring.

I spent part of a bout of FMLA learning to develop simple PyTorch models to help with our data processing, which is sometimes frustratingly qualitative because nobody can define rigorously what they want to compute, just endless sketches and corner cases
Just shut down the CDC. Problem solved /s.
Congratulations just had mine a few months ago so this is certainly the skill I’m working on!

Other than that sharpen guitar skills, linear algebra, and as a rubyist thinking about doing something in elixir. But we will see how the time allotment goes with an infant part of the program now.
We're getting closer, but 480Hz is still too slow for a convincing simulation of phosphor decay. 1000Hz will probably be enough.
Bare-metal Rust: I’ve worked professionally with Rust for 3 years, and embedded Rust for 2. But mostly on RPi 4. I want to make more hardware prototypes, and I have half a dozen ideas.

Nix for production: I’ve used NixOS on my work laptop for 9 months, and I’ve deployed it in production for on-prem CI, dashboard web servers, blogs, VPN gateways, DNS servers. But I could sink another 200 hours into more “katas”, especially wrt. deployment and handling a network of devices.

My path is to create learning material for others.
Thank you all for the suggestions.
I've been running my brand of scented products and cosmetics (https://yuma.gr) for 2 years now. 2 months ago we completed a rebranding and we're steadily gaining national consumer awareness of our existence as a brand.

From the top of my head, in order of importance:

1. Your perspective is unique - no one else shares your exact point of view. Try everything.

2. Master digital marketing: Google & Facebook Ads, Server Side Tracking, Google Tag Manager, and Analytics. Recommended communities:

- reddit.com/r/PPC

- measure.chat

3. Keep creative talent in-house (designers, developers)

4. Study pricing psychology (eg. kolenda.io/guides/pricing)

5. Good books with warstories:

* Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

* The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing & of Branding (2 separate books) by Al Ries

6. Learn accounting essentials, each country has its own system

7. Provide solid support via multiple channels (phone, email, chat, social etc)
Thank you, I'm checking that out now.
Awesome. I find it so ironic that the main thing tempting me to buy to a high resolution high framerate monitor is the desire to better emulate a low resolution low frame rate CRT.
I was not aware that the error bars between kashrut and marit ayin are that wide. I figured that it was because of the intersection of Jewish middle class culture and Chinese culture starting in the 1930s, and because Chinese restaurants generally do not serve dairy products.
I'm holding a thin USB-C Samsung cable right now.
If siblings are to be believed, there is nothing we can do about it aside from being very careful not to release the hydrogen into the atmosphere (at which point it will “burn” whether we want to or not)
This kind of cheap cable won't fast charge in any case. Add a few dollars if you want that.
I’m secular and Xmas for us meant unbounded time in the snow after possibly fun toys when little, as the Santa thing we knew as Santa far more than anything religious.
I generally agree with you. However, I would look at the $30k as a get started fund. Stroller, baby clothes, diapers, crib, etc. I think it would go a long ways if it was spent wisely.

This is something the US should do. US would probably tax the $30k though.
The ability to separate work and family, spending time with my family, and to act on some long-standing personal projects and books waiting to be read. I want rely on work to drive work-related skills while re-capturing some of my personal time for personal endeavors. For work, I hope to get into Rust with embedded systems, FPGAs, and increasing general-purpose software skills on the backend and frontend side as well.
Right, countries will be launching blockades and wars over the invaluable contribution that for example Sub-Saharan Africans can give to a country.
1) Improved fluency in reading Latin, so I can get through more of Seneca's Letters without so many hours referring to dictionaries and my first-year (and only) textbook; 2) improve Morse code copying speed from 15 wpm to a solid 20 wpm.
The innocence project has an interest in showing the justice system to be more capricious and random than it really is. The guy was exculpated by the evidence, and the system worked as intended.

Yes it has problems but the headline and story are obscuring what really happened here. The guy was nowhere near death row.
Interesting! I had always thought that sketching deadlines brings the best but timeboxing completes it with its second half of deciding when to start it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ4wBv0w9ew
Two weeks ago I found John Maynard Keynes's 1951 volume Essays in Biography at Calico Books in Ventura (bookhounds like myself enjoy provenance details like that). He knew Ramsay personally, and one of the essays in the book is dedicated to him. I especially enjoyed the following passage by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson that Keynes quotes. Dickinson wrote this about Ramsay and also about C P Sanger, an older man who died about the same time:

It does not become a Cambridge man to claim too much for his university, nor am I much tempted to do so. But there is, I think, a certain type, rare, like all good things, which seems associated in some peculiar way with my alma mater. I am thinking of men like Leslie Stephen (the original of Meredith's Vernon Whitford), like Henry Sidgwick, like Maitland, like one who died but the other day with all his promise unfulfilled. It is a type unworldly without being saintly, unambitious without being inactive, warmhearted without being sentimental. Through good report and ill such men work on, following the light of truth as they see it; able to be sceptical without being paralyzed; content to know what is knowable and to reserve judgment on what is not. The world could never be driven by such men, for the springs of action lie deep in ignorance and madness. But it is they who are the beacon in the tempest, and they are more, not less, needed now than ever before. May their succession never fail!
CO2 has its problems but at least nature automatically recycles it and produces O2 again.

But what about hydrogen? Wouldn’t burning it consume our oxygen supply with no way to replenish without large scale electrolysis? Seems like this could be a worse disaster since nature doesn’t do that by default.
The marketing trick that had the most impact on my mindset has been this article about how to structure landing pages https://marketingexamples.com/landing-page/guide.

If you didn't know about it already, I think that you could use it to tweak the Nuenki landing page, and you'll possibly have some aha moment that'll help in marketing down the line.
Browser script integration was close to being TCL but JavaScript won or what was called LiveScript from NetScape.
Coupling nitrogen-vacancy center spins in diamond to a grape dimer